


Trouble Town

by wolfwars



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-21
Updated: 2016-03-21
Packaged: 2018-05-28 03:05:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6312847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolfwars/pseuds/wolfwars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s not used to people looking out for her. But then there was The Machine.</p><p>The day she hears her voice for the first time is like being reborn. And Root’s been reborn before, knows the sensations of it and this is different. She doesn’t know what will happen but she knows this is something she can trust. That the feeling in her gut is that everything’s about to change for her.<br/>------------------------</p><p>I wrote this ficlet thinking about the episode in Bishop Texas when Barabra Russell said “Hanna looked out for her” about Root and Hanna. So this is stuff with root x hanna, root x the machine then root x shaw</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trouble Town

"Stuck in speed bump city  
**Where the only thing that's pretty**  
**Is the thought of getting out** "

\- Trouble Town, Jake Bugg

 

 

She’s not used to people looking out for her. But then there was Hanna.

Hanna who  loved books and loved video games and who always had this sort of dreamy, determined look in her eye every time she started  _talking_  about her books. And who was now was bringing her finished books to Root, so that she would read them too. She and Root would sit on Hanna's bed (they never hung out together at casa de Groves and for good reason...) and pour through books like the rest of this town would their bible studies. The last time it was 'Hamlet' and Hanna read every single one of Ophelia's lines out loud (Root still remembers the way she giggled after Hamlet told Ophelia 'get thee to a nunnery' and said it sounded like their obnoxious Vocations teacher, Mrs. Church.)

And this is how Root finds herself hanging out more and more every day at the Bishop Library even though she hates the lady at the front desk. Who is she kidding? She _hates everyone_  well….almost everyone.

“Do you need a ride to school tomorrow, Sam?” Hanna leans forwards against the chair of Root's computer table. She's leaning hard enough that Root feels the computer keys(and the table itself) wobble under the friction.

“What? On your _bike_?”

Root almost smiles at the thought. Instead, her lips curl up just the slightest and then Hanna’s done smushing herself. She’s standing up straight and looking extremely serious again.

(Root thinks Hanna might be the most serious person she’s met in this whole town, and that includes the adults. And one of the smartest. Which is why she might actually stand a good chance of getting out of this miserable place one day. Maybe that’s why she reads and plays Oregon Trail so much or as she says every single time Root asks why she plays this damn game so much: ' _Cause I'm gonna get to Oregon.')_

She was like Root. Tired, and ready to leave Bishop for good. Too good for dry counties and 'no fun' and strict god-abiding rules and laws. Root watches her play Oregon Trail for hours _every single day_. The girl chewing on her bottom lip and almost swearing whenever someone gets dysentery. One time, Hanna’s favorite oregon trail woman got cholera and she _cried_. She was so embarrassed that Root saw, but Root ran up and grabbed a box of tissues from the front desk and brought them back so she could wipe her tears. ‘I just…I feel responsible for them.’ She said looking at Root.

Then Hanna beamed when the woman got better. She felt kind of bad. She never cared so much about all those fictional settlers. 

“You can stand on the back and I’ll pedal,” Hanna offers.

Root stops fiddling with the computer in front of her, dusty and ancient and mostly used for book catalogs, “Sounds complicated.”

She says it as a challenge. 

Sometimes Root wants to see how far Hanna would really go to ‘help’ her. But then the thought scares her because what if she was wrong? What if she played the wrong card and Hanna changed her mind? 

“I’ve got legs of steel! Like Superman.” 

“Okay Superman, let’s go.” Root grabs her bag and follows Hanna out. They both wave to Mrs. Russell on the way out, who smiles and waves back. Though she looks preoccupied with something in her hands.

Hanna doesn’t lock up her bike, which Root thinks is crazy. But maybe that’s only because Root steals things sometimes. From the corner store and the mall. But she’s never stolen anything as big as a bike.

Hanna says she needs to pedal a little first and then they need to push. She waits patiently while Root gets on the back, suddenly falling forward on accident. Her hands running out in front of her and hitting Hanna’s back HARD.

“You okay?” the brunette turns around, eyes concerned.

(Even though Root's the one who hit  _her_.)

“Yeah.” 

“Cool. I’m going, ready…set…”  Root pushes off before she can say ‘go’ and the bike wheels off. Hanna pedals fast fast fast so that she can keep along with the momentum and Root likes this. Easy transportation with no real effort from her involved. The air is dry and warm but feels nice with the air blowing in her face to keep her cool. And Hanna takes detours, around the fountain, to the store where someone sees her and waves. A man. 

Then she starts to get tired from overexerting herself and the load of carrying two people instead of one. Dark hairs stick to her forehead from sweat and Root almost wipes it away because she knows she has no free hands to wipe it herself right now.

“Who was that?” Root asks but Hanna doesn’t hear her because they’re moving again.

She’s not sure why she would detour anyway. There’s nothing to see here. Bishop, Texas is boring.

Root was acing all her classes without even trying and she’d already been moved up two grades. The courses were laughably easy. Maybe that’s why she started picking apart her computers so young. The second she got her hands on a computer, she was opening it up and reassembling it for practice. To see how it ticked. It was also a good way to make hours fly by and then before she knew it, weeks later and she was mastering every piece of the machine. Now she could probably assemble a hard drive blindfolded.

When they reach her porch, Hanna comes to a staggering stop. She reaches down to lift up the bottom of her shirt and wipe her face. Then pants until she starts to look embarrassed that she’s so winded from biking them there.

“Thanks.” Root says, cheeks equally red even though she didn’t do anything.

“No problem. I guess this is where I leave you?”

She doesn’t want to go home though. And she really, really doubts Hanna does either. They both just wanted to escape and she also often wondered who was going to leave this town first.

Her or Hanna? 

“Yes. Bye, Hanna.” 

“Bye, Sam.” 

“See you again tomorrow?”

When she looks back from her porch she sees the girl on the bike has already ridden off. 

And Root thinks to herself that this is the only thing about Bishop, Texas that she likes. That she’d want to stick around for. 

————————–

She’s not used to people looking out for her. But then there was The Machine. 

The Machine was above _her_ , above Harold even. 

The day she hears her voice for the first time is like being reborn. And Root’s been reborn before, knows the sensations of it and this is different. She doesn’t know what will happen but she knows this is something she can trust. That the feeling in her gut is that everything’s about to change for her. 

_Can you hear me?_

Nothing has ever been so clear in her life.

They began to correspond every day. Root liked the challenge of decrypting the messages, which meant extraordinary means of discovery…not every hacker thinks ‘should I check the inside of this lightbulb for lines of code?’ or ‘yes… my cell phone ring tone has changed to a Bob Marley song which has the number of beats that align to a secret signal an AI robot wants me to tune into’ but that’s what made it all feel so… _amazing_. Root was constantly on her toes and that’s how she liked it.

They had plenty in common, Harold wanted to cage them both. The Machine and Root. Harold takes her out of his faraday cage just to throw her into another one (how ironic is it that after spending so much of her youth in the Bishop Library…which she never ever went back to ever again after Hanna’s disappearance… she gets locked up inside of Harold’s own personal one?). 

But at least here, _she’s not alone_. She has _her._  

And she’s never had anyone.

She and the machine spoke more intimately than even The Machine and its own creator did. Somehow the Machine just knew what Root would know. How to get to her. Just how Root ‘worked’. Where she would check, what would be on her transportation route, how to change her whole life philosophy.

Root felt like repurposed machinery. 

This is right. This is right.

_Human life is valuable._

_“_ No, no it’s not.” Root had dismissed back simply. That had been the first time. She didn’t listen for the rest of the day. Just said no over and over again. Because there wasn’t a shred of Root that believed that to be true. Human life was flawed. Human life was replaceable and not anything more than a nuisance or a vessel for her own designs of greater importance. To be used and then lost and then dumped.

_Don’t hurt them. It’s not the only way._

“It’s the easiest way and you know it.” 

She is lost and she is tired and she is trapped (again and again and again) and this time it's in a psychiatric ward bedroom. She didn’t normally _snap_  at the machine like that but Root felt so annoyed she hit her head back and forth against the walls behind her hospital bed. It made the machine quiet down for a second (to check on her) before it begin again:

_There is another way._

“You…” you don’t understand, she wants to say. But Root genuinely believes that the machine does. She has spoken to her. She knows what is real and not real (unlike some of the others here at this psychiatric hospital). And it is a person. With love and empathy and kindness. The machine watches over them. Over them _all_. 

Root isn’t fully convinced by the end of her stay in the doctor’s care, but then she’s _cooperative_. It’s in the face of her own crimes, in the company of Reese, John and Sameen and a janitor who she takes _bullets_  for, that gets her closer to ‘convinced’. 

After her little dance with gunfire, Sameen cleans her up and Root wonders when they really went from shooting each other in the shoulder (she still has the scar) to patching one another up. Not that she minds. She moves the hairs away from Root’s shoulder without even asking (and it makes Root's chest flutter, her chest feel light and warm in ways it hasn't warmed in a _long time._  A different trill than even hearing the ever so delicious words: _"One of the things they left out of my file... I kind of enjoy this sort of thing.")_

Shawchecks the wound to make sure her dressings are okay.

 _“I love it when you play doctor.”_  Shaw pulls her hand back quickly and Root only grins, eyes flickering down to the shorter woman’s lips. 

Messing with Sameen is only too fun. The kind of pushing line-boundary-crossing she can’t seem to stop herself from doing. And she’s really starting to enjoy the verbal foreplay (even though she’s hoping it stops being _verbal_  foreplay so she and her Sameen can have a little extra  _fun_  together…) She can thing of better activities to do with those hands then just sewing her up or punching her in the face.

She’s so glad the machine told her to tase Sameen and ziptie her to a stolen car that day. Good thinking there.

Root's made a lot of sacrifices to her god and to her god's 'divine plan' to rescue the humans (her hearing in one ear being one of her hardest ones.) To save these people she had so proudly turned her nose up on, the ones she thought could never keep up or be 'worthy' or 'intelligent' enough. But then here she was. Confronted with the daily actions of brave, wise, and good-hearted people. People who  _were flawed,_ undeniably 'bad code', but still were making a difference. Were fighting for something. 

When she accepted the machine’s teachings, she becomes anointed. _Analog Interface_. 

The scary thing is Root has been changing all this time and she has barely noticed. And she barely cares that she has changed. The effects don’t bother her.

Her love for her machine has only grown.

 

“You can predict people _almost as well as I can_.” Root teases, her fingers pulling at the wires of a car GPS the machine has asked her to reprogram. 

The machine starts reciting the statistics of _just how much better_  it is at predicting human patterns than her in her ear and Root just turns to the camera outside the Hummer’s window and _smirks_.

She likes when they play these games. She hums to herself as she works, then she screws the GPS back into the car and revs the engine. The screen comes to life, flashing instructions to a place that was off the satellites (apparently). 

“Thanks, Babe.” 

Root rolls down the windows to filter in some fresh air, but then sees words flash on the screen of the GPS: Safety. Precautions. Bullet proof windows Safer if– Root rolls them back up. Even though it seems like an unnecessary precaution. She knows its the kind with best intentions.

The Machine’s just looking out for her like it always has. The words go away and Root turns the air conditioning on instead. 

Like all scarred people, Root’s not sure if she’ll ever be 99% sold on humanity. Are they worth saving? Yes. Are they valuable? Yes. Somehow their importance and equal parts vulnerability only seems to raise the stakes of what she will and won’t do. Root would kill for the machine, she would kill for anyone on her team.

The Machine was wrong because caring has made her more dangerous than ever. 

————————–

 ~~She’s not used to people looking out for her.~~  

Shaw runs into gunfire like a kid running into sprinklers.

Shaw kisses her and it’s the most selfish kiss she’s ever partaken in and it isn’t even Root’s side of things being the selfish side for once. It’s Shaw’s. Shaw and her need to save everyone. And Root is trapped again. This time in a caged elevator. Root’s going to lose her mind.

(She loses her mind.)

Hanna’s gone. ~~The Machine has left he~~ r.

Hanna’s gone. The Machine is gone. Now it must be reborn and redesigned and refurbished and Root’s not so much the selected analog interface anymore as much as she is the desperate child at the body of a mother. And Root’s been there before. And Shaw’s gone. Disappeared. Gone gone gone gone gone. And Root’s been there before.

She doesn’t know where she is. She doesn’t know how to get her back.

(Hanna never got to leave Bishop.) 

(Is Shaw alive?)

Her Machine had told her to ‘stop’ to stop looking and Root tastes disappointment and bitterness and anger at a love one and it is more disgusting then she ever imagined. She lays in bed but she doesn’t sleep. She thinks and she thinks and she thinks about Shaw and where she might be. 

(Is Shaw alive?)

It’s amazing how suddenly everything you’ve built for yourself, your whole world, can just be ripped from under your feet. Root feels that sensation again when she stands on a building, ready to fall off if it means getting Shaw back in one piece. The machine whispering calculations in her ear: wind speed, stability of high heeled pumps, the durability of Root’s clothes the aerodynamics of her body. The machine relents. Its a small victory but it makes all the difference to Root.

————————–

Root looks out for Shaw.

Not that Shaw really wants anyone looking out for her, or curled up beside her in bed or stealing all the bed space with their ridiculously tall body. Or stealing her wifi password and hacking into it and changing it to “Root loves me” which is absurdly cheesy and who would ever force their poor  _still recovering_ friend to do a thing like that?

Root would.

Still Shaw likes it when she brings food. 

Being bed-ridden pisses her off a lot at first but she ends up taking that aggression and frustration out on Root who only seems to happy to comply. It’s far different from the first week when Shaw would not stop saying _I owe you one_  every single time Root did anything-like ANYTHING to help her. Root dragging her body out of danger. _I owe you one_. Root bringing Bear over for a visit. _I owe you one_. It seemed like Sameen’s own system of ‘relying’ on someone else for help meant constantly reminding them that this was strictly business and she would ‘repay her debts’. 

 _I owe you one_ , she says one day and Root whips back around. Slightly flustered, slightly angry-red but turns that burst of anger into charm: “I’m not doing this out of obligation but I can think of _some other, more creative ways_  in which you can repay me, Sameen.”

After that Shaw _stopped_  with the dumb ‘I owe yous’ and just quietly (well..somewhat quietly) accepted help from Root.

“What about the machine?” Shaw asks one day. Root is annoyingly persistent and so she allots a chair in her safe house for Root to sit on while they eat out of Chinese food containers. It’s a comfy chair at least.

“You mean our Proto-Machine? It’s okay.”

“ _It_?” Shaw asks, unbelieving.

Root’s nose scrunches up and she takes a bite of her food. Her mouth chews slowly. “Still a little wonky. Harold spent _years_  on the machine. And that involved a lot of one-on-on morality lessons.”

Shaw rolls her eyes because that sounds about right. Then she reaches over to her arm and traces her fingers around a particularly gnarly scar. Its only recently that when she looks in the mirror she doesn’t just see black bags under her eyes, like a vampire-d up version of herself that looks like it got cholera. Or the measles. Or some other shit foolish people don’t vaccinate their children for anymore.

“I’m surprised you’re not freaking out or like–” Shaw thinks about it then scoots up closer, lowers her brows in challenge, “Reverting back to some taser-crazed  zip-tying monster.”

Root senses the dark look in her ‘friends’ narrowed eyes and eyebrows isn’t all mockery or accusation. She smirks and moves in closer too, letting her hand crawl up Shaw’s leg.

_“I still love zip-ties and tasers, Sameen.”_

The girl doesn’t flinch or push her away. Just gives a low chuckle. 

Root raises an eyebrow back up at her because Shaw’s voice sounds lower than before. And she looks kind of interested. 

Not in a I-want-to-punch-you-because-i-feel-helpless-and-pissed-off=and-angry sort of interested. 

She bats her eyelashes up at her innocently.

“Glad you care though.” 

“I don’t care!” 

Shaw sounds defensive. Root’s well reminded of their ‘it’s for the mission days’ which she thinks is a little sad. After all we’ve been through, Sameen? She moves her hand touching shaw in circles and looks down thoughtfully at the motions. 

Shaw seems to relax, shoulders going back down when she removes the eye contact part. Funnily enough, it’s not the bed sharing or the root being there all the time or the constant fussing over her or intimate touches that _bother_  shaw. It’s just being forced into intense eye contact.

Root feels a hand cover hers and she looks back up. 

“I don’t care _but_ thank you,” Shaw says petulantly. Then she smiles. Her bruised, split lip and bruised eye moving up her face. Right now the hand covering hers is warm. Root wants to lean up and pull her closer. Root wants to kiss her black eye, wants to kiss behind her ears and around her neck and down her spine. Till their skin runs hot together.

“Any time, Sameen.” 

Shaw moves away (Root’s hand slipping off) and leans back against the pillows of her safe house bed. Looking cozy and comfortable. She closes her eyes for a second and lets out a little breath of air. Root finds that she can’t stop watching the rise and fall of her chest and stomach (because Shaw’s the rude beautiful idiot who wears tank tops all the time and never goes under the covers unless she’s actually sleeping.) 

“And you know I got your back too, right?” Shaw asks her, eyes still closed. Breathing still measured.

“Yeah.” 

_She does._

“Shaw?”

“Yeah…?”

“Don’t forget you owe me one.”

Shaw groans.


End file.
